Post-Pandemic TV Roundup (part 2)

This is part two of my post-pandemic TV roundup.  See last week for part 1.

The Power (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Scifi/Fantasy)

The ultimate expression of female empowerment, this posits a world where people start to develop powers ... but only the young girls.  Suddenly the abuse of young women becomes something you might die for, and this show does a great job balancing between making you root for the women who are breaking their chains (sometimes literally), and making you think about how the men are dealing with this, and sometimes even sympathizing with them.¹  Great show, great cast (mostly younger female actors, but also the always-reliable Toni Collette), thought-provoking material.

Dimension 20 “A Crown of Candy” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

This is an older season of D20, but I hadn’t watched it when it came out.  When they announced they were doing a sequel season,² I figured I’d better watch the original, which was described as “Game of Thrones meets Candyland,” which is about as incongruous a pairing as you could imagine.  And, yet, it’s a perfect description of this season, where the players are told up front to make two characters because you better expect one to die.  Brennan goes hard after the main D20 cast (Lou, Emily, Ally, Siobhan, Zac, and Murph) and the joy of having a rock candy king and his two licorice daughters, a chocolate bunny vizier, etc is tempered by some real pathos and tragedy.  But every player has at least one amazing, kick-ass moment, and the story hangs together beautifully; this is one of the best D20 seasons, hands down.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount Plus, 4 seasons thus far, Sci-fi Animation)

The idea to focus on characters who are not the main bridge crew of Star Trek was perhaps pioneered by John Scalzi’s Redshirts³ (although a case might also be made for the Babylon 5 episode “A View from the Gallery”, so the idea to turn that into a series was, I suppose, inevitable.  That it would be so compelling was a bit unexpected, and that it woudl be animated was completely out of left field.  But it really works surprisingly well.  Plus you have to be up on Lower Decks to understand the crossover episode in S2 of Strange New Worlds,⁴ which is just brilliant.

Warrior (Max, 3 seasons, Martial Arts Action)

In 1971, so the story goes, Bruce Lee came up with a show about a Chinese man doing kung fu in the Old West.  Studio heads took the idea and (of course) made it about a white man who knew kung fu in the Old West, which is how Kung Fu came about, and why it starred David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee.  44 years later, Lee’s daughter Shannon revived the original idea and created Warrior.  Starring a brilliant Andew Koji,⁵ embodying Lee’s style without doing a blatant impression of him, and some strong female leads as well, this semi-historical story is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1870s, and covers the Tong Wars, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and lots of other very real things from the period.  The later seasons don’t quite live up to the gorgeous visuals and deep stories of season 1, but still a very strong showing throughout.

One Piece (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Live Action Anime)

I am not a huge anime fan.  There are a few shows I’ve enjoyed,⁶ but One Piece was not one of them.  It was just too silly for me, and I never could get into it.  So I fully expected this live-action adaptation to fall flat as well.  Amazingly, it was exactly the opposite: I was captivated early, probably by the infectious positivity of Iñaki Godoy.⁷  This show is gleefully insane, but in a mostly family-friendly way, and it’s just so much fun.  And the characters have surprising depth and likeability.

Deadlocked (Paramount Plus, 1 season, Documentary)

Via The Problem with Jon Stewart,⁸ I was introduced to the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, an amazing podcast focussing on the Supreme Court.  And, these days, that’s a pretty important topic to understand.  Even if you can’t commit to listening to Strict Scrutiny every week, you can watch 4 episodes of really insightful history about it (and two of the three SS hosts show up in this series as well).  I can’t count the number of times while watching I said “oh, that’s how that happened!” Highly recommended.

Bodies (Netflix, 1 season, Sci-fi Thriller)

I used to watch two types of shows, mainly: sci-fi/fantasy shows, and police procedurals.  I cut back on the police procedurals after the Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to how much they normalize bad police behavior, but I still enjoy the format.  And what better way to enjoy it than to combine it with a sci-fi/fantasy story—in particular, a time travel story—as 4 London detectives from 4 different time periods all fight to solve the same crime: the same dead body, in fact, which has somehow appeared in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053.  Time-travel stories live or die by how well they come together in the end, and this one does a bang up job of that in my opinion.  Definitely worthwhile.

Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Adult Animation)

An exploration of her own half-Japanese ancestry, Amber Noizumi’s Blue Eye Samurai, about a half-white outcast swordsman, is quite possibly the most stunning piece of adult animation I’ve seen, period.  Lighter on the gore than Castlevania or Arcane, but heavier on the nudity than either, it does an amazing job of bringing complex characters to life and putting them in remarkably interesting storylines, all set against the backdrop of Japan’s isolationist Edo period.  Gorgeous visuals, brilliant acting, tense action scenes: this one’s got it all.

The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix, 1 season, Horror)

Mike Flanagan is quite possibly the best director working in modern American horror.  His movies are brilliant, but it’s really his series that elevate him to the sublime.  The Haunting of Hill House, based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, still stands as the pinnacle, with one of the best (and well-earned) jump scares of all time, and that’s just one scene.  His follow-up, The Haunting of Bly Manor (based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) was not quite as good, though still worth watching.  But the latest series, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on many Edgar Allen Poe short stories, is a worthy contender to Hill House.  Like the seasons of American Horror Story, Flanagan’s series reuse many of the same actors in different roles, and many (like Carla Gugino, Rahul Kohli, and Flanagan’s wife Kiate Siegel) give performances that would demand viewing just on their strength alone.  But Flanagan also has an eye for atmosphere, and the creep factor here is through the roof.  Especailly if you’re a Poe fan (but even if you’re not), this is a must-watch.

Culprits (Hulu, 1 season, Thriller)

Not quite a spy story, not quite a heist story, but containing elements of each, this British show features the talents of Gemma Arterton, Eddie Izzard, and the second appearance this roundup of Kirby⁹ (but not the last).  Plus it was my discovery of Irish actor Niamh Algar, whose turn as the cold-blooded killer codenamed “Psycho” was just breathtaking.  A twisty-turny plot, good (i.e. not confusing) use of flashback, and empathetic characters make this a great show.

Dimension 20 “Burrow’s End” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

Yet another Aabria-Iyengar-led season of D20, this adapts the world of Watership Down to use weasels instead of rabbits, injects a healthy dose of Cronenberg-ian body horror, and wraps it all in a bow of Arrival.  Aabria’s storytelling is top-notch, as always, and the players are a great group as well: Brennan as player (as is usual for an Aabria-helmed season), playing the mother to twins, portrayed by his wife(!) Izzy and Siobhan, Erika as the grandmother, and the lovely Rashawn Scott and Jasper Cartwright as the sister and brother-in-law.  Siobhan’s prepubescent boy weasel in particular is delightful, but they all do an amazing job, and this season is one of their strongest.

Fargo season 5 (Hulu, Surrealist Crime Thriller)

Whoever had the brilliant idea to turn the movie Fargo into a American Horror Story-style anthology series (by which I mean each season is a completely separate story) was a genius.  But not all of the seasons live up to the potential.  This one really does.  Recycling just a few of the tropes originally introduced by the Coen Brothers in the movie, but weaving a story just as bizarre and unbelievable, this season harnesses the acting of some major powerhouses: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dave Foley, and John Hamm; Lamorne Morris from New Girl and Woke; Joe Keery from Stranger Things; and, in the primary protagonist’s role, a breakout performance from Juno Temple.  The byzantine plots are there, the interconnections among the characters and the lunatic personalities ... everything you could want from a Fargo story.  And a (mostly) satisfying resolution.

Death and Other Details (Hulu, 1 season, Whodunnit Mystery)

If you like classic detective fiction like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and/or modern whodunnits like Knives Out and Glass Onion, you’ll dig the intricate plot and colorful characters in this show starring Mandy Patinkin (who’s been in everything from Criminal Minds to Princess Bride to Homeland) and Violett Beane, and the supporting cast (including Rahul Kohli, from just up above in The Fall of the House of Usher) is magnificent as well.  With a number of great twists—some of which you may see coming and some of which you won’t—and very creative use of flashbacks, as well as reconstructions of past events by analytical minds, it’s a fantastic story that holds together in a very satisfying way.

Dead Boy Detectives (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Fantasy)

Somehow managing to be a spin-off of both Doom Patrol and The Sandman, the Dead Boy Detectives are comic book heroes created by Neil Gaiman for the The Sandman issue #25; they then showed up in both Swamp Thing and Doom Patrol in the Children’s Crusade crossover event.  Though they never made it to the Netflix Sandman, they did appear in an episode of the Max Doom Patrol.  And Kirby (Death from The Sandman) does make a cameo appearance in the first episode here.  But, most importantly, this show, about two ghost detectives who died young and now solve mysteries for other ghosts, is neither The Sandman nor Doom Patrol: it’s slightly more fun than the former, slightly less insane than the latter, ultimately charming, full of Gaimanesque characters (even the ones that he didn’t actually invent), and just a joyride of the fantastical and phantasmagorical.

True Detective “Night Country” (Max, Surrealist Crime Thriller)

The first season of True Detective was utterly brilliant, driven by great acting, a complex but grounded plot, and lots of touches of surrealism.  This season is in some ways superior: the acting is just as top-notch (including a Clarice Starling and a Dr. Who), the plot is just as complex, and the mystical aspects are heightened.  It culminates in a downbeat yet oddly satisfying ending, but there’s a surprising amount of body horror before you get there.  A fun ride.

Honorable Mentions:

These are the series that weren’t quite 5 stars, but a slight cut above 4 stars.  I thought I’d give at least a quick shout out to each.

• Invincible (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Adult Animation) – (Actually, there are two seasons out now, but I’ve only watched the first one.)  Bloody, tacky, shocking, borderline disgusting, and epically entertaining; it’s a superhero show that sets out to shatter superhero tropes.

• Hacks (Max, 3 seasons, Comedy) – With a stunning cast, including Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, this is a hilarious show that is also touching and relevant.

• Peacemaker (Max, 1 season, Superhero Comedy) – If you liked the bizarrerie that was The Guardians of the Galaxy, but wish it was even more insane and borderline offensive, you will absolutely love this show.  Great cast, weird stories, fun time.

• Station Eleven (Max, 1 season, Post-Apocalyptic Drama) – Utilizing flashbacks in a way that generates tension as opposed to what it usually generates (which is annoyance), and featuring a stunning performance from Mackenzie Davis (of Halt and Catch Fire), this tells a self-contained story with a lot of heart and just the right amount of surrealism.

• Naomi (Max, 1 season, Superhero Fantasy) – Cancelled too soon, so don’t expect complete resolution, but this teenage superhero story is still pretty amazing.

• The Old Man (Hulu, 1 season, Spy Thriller) – A twisty-turny storyline makes this rise above the usual fare, but it’s the top-notch performances from Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, and Alia Shawkat that really bring it home.

• The Orville (Hulu, 3 seasons, Sci-fi) – Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to Star Trek, season 1 starts off pretty much exactly as goofy as you’d expect from the creator of Family Guy, but it rapidly achieves a depth of emotion and plots that is both surprising and rewarding.  Cancelled too soon, but wrapped up pretty neatly nonetheless; don’t sleep on this one.

• Sweet Tooth (Netflix, 1 season, Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy) – (Again, season 2 is out, but I haven’t yet watched it.)  Another great cast, with possibly an even better storyline than Station Eleven.  It’s a very different show, though, so it’s not a fair comparison.  Just watch both: you won’t regret it.

• Severance (Apple+, 1 season, Surreal Sci-fi) – A lot depends on where they go in season 2: if that is as satisfying as I hope it will be, it might elevate this to a full 5 stars.  It got a lot of attention at the time, so I probably don’t need to convince you to watch it, and, if you don’t like weird shit, you’ll hate it, but the story does eventually resolve in a satisfying way, so give it a chance.  Also, John Turturro doesn’t do bad shit, whether film or TV.¹⁰

• Little Demon (Hulu, 1 season, Adult Animation) – Another ultraviolent cartoon not for children (nor for the faint of heart of any age, really), this is elevated by the voice talents of Aubrey Plaza and Danny DeVito and a plotline that’s just plain fun.  Hulu seems to have jettisoned it, so you may not be able to find it, but, if you can, and if you don’t mind cartoon nudity and cartoon guts (and sometimes both at once), you might enjoy this.

• Lockwood & Co (Netflix, 1 season, Urban Fantasy) – It’s a bit of a YA show, and it was cancelled prematurely, but it’s still pretty great.  Teens hunt ghosts because they’re the only ones who can; set in an alternate timeline London.

• The Night Agent (Netflix, 1 season, Spy Thriller) – Decent acting and an intricate but not wholly unbelievable plot make this better-than-average modern spy fare.

• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime, 5 seasons, Comedy) – If you’re a fan of Gilmore Girls, then you’ve probably already watched this, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s other great series.  But, even if you’re not,¹¹ the magnificent combination of Rachel Brosnahan and Alex Borstein (both of whom are hilarious on their own), not to mention an amazing supporting cast with folks such as Tony Shalhoub, Caroline Aaron, and Luke Kirby as a brilliant Lenny Bruce, really make this show about female empowerment set in 1950s New York sing.  (Also contains possibly the best series ending episode since Six Feet Under.)

• Velma (Max, 2 seasons, Adult Animation) – I hate Scooby-Doo in nearly all its forms, but I love Mindy Kaling, and her reimagining of the origin of the Scooby gang as a multicultural blending is really entertaining and unexpected.

• Dimension 20 “Mentopolis” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play) – Yes, another season of D20.¹²  This one is not D&D, but don’t let that stop you: with every character representing a different facet of personality in a story that takes place inside the brain of a scientist embroiled in intrigue, this is The Maltese Falcon meets Osmosis Jones in all the best ways.

• Doom Patrol (Max, 4 seasons, Superhero Surrealism) – If you love batshit crazy storylines, it’s tough to beat Doom Patrol, based on another set of comics from Grant Morrison, the creator of Happy!.¹³  Not as much ultraviolence as Happy! or Preacher, not quite as much sex as either, but more actual superheroes (sort of) than both put together, none of the 46 episodes of Doom Patrol make any sense at all, and yet they tell some truly compelling, completely human stories while following the lives of a batch of misfit antiheroes that will make your head spin.  Very satisfying.

• Gen V (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Adult Superhero) – Every bit as demeneted as the show it’s spun off from—that would be The Boys—this is fantastic side-project.  If you love The Boys, you must watch this; if you hated The Boys, this definitely won’t change your mind.

• I Am Not Okay with This (Netflix, 1 season, YA Urban Fantasy) – Sophia Lillis was in It (where she was amazing), in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (where she was amazing), and this, which is almost criminally unheard of.  Being amazing yet again in a very Carrie-esque turn, this coming-of-age-but-with-powers story is a gripping one, even though it’s left unfinished due to premature cancellation.

• Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix, 1 season, YA Comedy-Drama) – Yet another show that was Netflixed too soon, this one is a lot of fun, and contains the best depiction of “twin language” I’ve seen.  The characters are fun, the stories are fun, the action is crazy but not over the top, and I wish they had let them bring the show to a more satisifying conclusion.

__________

1 Granted, not that often.

2 Which, in the end, wasn’t as good as this one.

3 Check out the audiobook, read brilliantly by Wil Wheaton.

4 See last week.

5 Seen in the G.I. Joe movie Snake Eyes, and the much better Bullet Train.

6 In particular, Cowboy Bebop.  Pretty much everything else I’ve watched I was a casual fan of at best.

7 Who you can also see in The Imperfects, which only narrowly missed being included in this roundup.

8 See last week.

9 She was death in The Sandman last week.

10 unless Adam Sandler is involved.

11 Like me.

12 For those keeping count, that makes six in toto.

13 See part 2 of the pandemic roundup.

Optimistic, but never quite elegant

No time for a proper post this week: ChatGPT has a new model, and I’m trying to wrangle it into helping me solve a problem with my laptop that the previous model utterly failed at.  The prognosis thus far: limited success.  The new model is absolutely smarter, but I’m not sure it’s smart enough yet.

If you want to hear me ramble on about ChatGPT, I did a couple of posts last year on it:

• Getting Chatty
• Do Androids Dream of IQ Tests?

In the meantime, you’ll just have to wait another week for me to get back to my post-pandemic TV roundup.

Post-Pandemic TV Roundup (part 1)

Around about the one-year anniversay of the pandemic, I published a pandemic TV roundup, which described all the televsion I’d been watching during the lockdown.  Well, not all of it: even two, longer-than-usual posts wouldn’t have been sufficient for that task.  But all the TV shows that I’d both started and finished in that year.  And I rated them all, from one to five stars (well, except that nothing got one star, because, if the show had really been that bad, I wouldn’t have finished it, so it wouldn’t have made the cut).  Now, I was able to do this detailed overview because I keep track of all the TV episodes I watch.  Originally, I started doing this because many streaming services were terrible at remembering where you left off, and I was tired of spending half an hour scanning through old episodes trying to remember how much I’d already watched.  So I just added it to my mega-spreadsheet where I keep track of my todo tasks.

Of course, just like the todo list itself, the bonus to this plan is that it serves as a diary: since I never delete data (a principle that one learns fairly early as a database programmer), everything I’ve ever done—and, now, everything I’ve ever watched—is recorded.  Well, not movies: I never bothered tracking them, because you watch them all in one sitting.  And a lot of “regular” viewing, such as The Daily Show, I don’t bother to track, because I always stay current on it, so there’s never any need to remember which episode I was on.  But, for episodic TV,¹ I’ve got a pretty solid record.

So, it occurred to me to do another roundup, only this time, since I’m now covering a period of over 3 years, I’m only going to talk about the best of the best, the stuff I’ve rated as 5 stars.  (I’ll do an honorable mention at the end for shows that came in at perhaps a 4.5.)  I’ll keep everything brief and spoiler-free; these are basically tiny recommendations as to the best stuff I’ve discovered in the past 3 years.  Some of it may predate that time, but it’s all stuff that I watched in that period and was blown away by.  And, as it turns out, there were enough shows on the list—even limiting it to 5 star shows—that I couldn’t squeeze them all into one post.  So this is part 1; part 2 will likely come next week.  Finally, the order is just chronological in terms of when I watched them, which is close enough to random that you really shouldn’t read anything into it.

Without further ado then: the roundup.

Dimension 20 “Pirates of Leviathan” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

One of the few seasons of D20 to be filmed entirely remotely during the pandemic, this still manages to be quite possibly the best season ever, and certainly up there in the top 10 (if not the top 5) medium-form actual play shows, period.²  This is like the all-star game for streaming D&D: Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray from Critical Role, B. Dave Walters from Idle Champions Presents and Invitation to Party, Aabria Iyengar from Worlds Beyond Number and Battle for Beyond, Krystina Arielle from Sirens of the Realms and Into the Mother Lands, and Carlos Luna from Rivals of Waterdeep and content producer for Roll20, all GM’ed by regular D20 game master Brennan Lee Mulligan, surely one of the best GMs in the space.  It’s a stunning season; highly recommended.

The Nevers (originally HBOMax, 1 season, Urban Fantasy)

Due to controversy over creator Joss Whedon, HBO cancelled this show after 1 season and then pulled it from their site, so you may not be able to find it anywhere.  But, if you ever get a chance, watch it: Whedon may be a toxic person to work with, but he puts together some magnificent content.  The story is not entirely resolved, but it’s sufficient that you won’t feel let down if you watch it all the way through.  There’s a twist that blindsided me in all the best ways, and the primarily female (primarily British) cast is just amazing.  Plus smaller roles from genre faves like Claudia Black (Farscape), Nick Frost (Spaced), and Pip Torrens (Preacher).

Dimension 20 “Magic & Misfits” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

The summer of 2021 was often referred to as “the Summer of Aabria,” because Aabria Iyengar was suddenly GMing for the top actual play shows: she did 8 episodes of a side story/prequel for Critical Role, 3 episodes of a where-are-they-now story for The Adventure Zone, and this season of D20, the first ever not GMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan (who instead sits in as a player).  This would not be the last time Aabria ran the dome at D20, but it is perhaps the best.  Including the entire cast of what would become Worlds Beyond Number (i.e. Lou Wilson and Erika Ishii were also present), plus the ever-engaging Danielle Radford, this off-kilter take on a Harry-Potter-like world manages to both celebrate and criticize that series all at the same time, with a surprisingly deft hand.  Brennan’s character of Evan Kelmp, the person pegged to become the Voldemort of the story, is perhaps the standout, as he rails against his fate in extremely amusing fashion.  It’s hard to beat “Pirates of Leviathan” for me, but this comes damned close.

Locke & Key (Netflix, 3 seasons, Urban Fantasy)

Based on a comic by the excellent (and prolific) Joe Hill, this fantasy centered on the 3 Locke children, who have recently lost their father and are forced to move back into their ancestral manor, features some magnificent acting, magnificent writing, and magnificent effects.  Plus recurring roles for genre faves such as Aaron Ashmore (Warehouse 13) and Kevin Durand (The Strain), and a story that is neither too rushed nor overstays its welcome ... just a gem.

Reacher (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Action/Mystery)

I never understood why someone let Tom Cruise play Jack Reacher, a character who is a full 10 inches taller than the actor.  I’ve never read the books myself, but I do know that the character is supposed to be an imposing, almost hulking, figure.  Alan Ritchson is still 3 inches too short, technically speaking, but he much more embodies the energy of the character.  Season 1 was insanely good; season 2 only a very slight step down.  Looking forward to future seasons.

Legend of Vox Machina (Amazon Prime, 2 seasons thus far, Adult Animation)

The idea to turn Critical Role campaigns into animated series was a natural one, and, after a record-breaking Kickstarter, the first of these, based on C1 of CR, became a reality via Amazon Prime.  The original cast all record their own characters, naturally, while the numerous NPCs are cast with a dazzling array of vocal talent, from the core voice actor pool (such as Grey Griffin, Darin De Paul, and Kelly Hu) to big name genre stars such as David Tenant (Dr Who), Gina Torres (Firefly), Khary Payton (The Walking Dead), Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99), and Lance Reddick (Fringe).  This is absolultely not a kid’s cartoon (although perhaps not quite as adult as Castlevania³), and it has a bit of a rocky start (the first two episodes can’t quite seem to find their tone), but give it a chance and you’ll be hooked.

The G Word (Netflix, Documentary/Educational)

As I said in the last roundup, I don’t typically do documentaries.  But Adam Conover, formerly of College Humor and mastermind of Adam Ruins Everything, gets a pass because he can make any topic entertaining.  With little introductions from President Barack Obama, each episode Adam delves into a different aspect of our government (“our” presuming you live in the US), and often how it’s been corrupted by capitalistic efforts.  I’m not sure there’s anything else you could watch that will simultaneously make you laugh, make you learn, and piss you off quite like this will.

Archive 81 (Netflix, Horror)

Starring Mamoudou Athie, who I knew as the titular Jerome of the “Oh Jerome, No” segments of Cake,⁴ and weaving a twisty little tale of surreality and bizarrerie, this genuinely creepy split-timeline story centers on a data archivist hired to clean up some tapes documenting the mysterious end of a sinister cult.  Mind-bending, but in a very good way.

The Problem with Jon Stewart (Apple+, 2 seasons, Comedy/News)

Less of a news show (like The Daily Show), and more of a deep-dive into topics of current interest (like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), the excellent return of the master of injecting humor into the often dark topics of our news cycle was cut short because Apple refused to let him discuss certain topics (like AI, where it had a significant monetary investment).  Still, the 20 episodes he managed to put out before being silenced covered some fantastic topics such as racism, climate change, gun control, and incarceration.  Educational, funny, and not to be missed.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, (Paramount Plus, 2 seasons thus far, Science Fiction)

I was legitimately surprised at how good this Star Trek prequel series was.  Featuring Christopher Pike, the original captain of the Enterprise (from the pilot of the original series), as protrayed by Anson Mount in his best turn since Hell on Wheels, this series collects an amazing array of both new and old faces in the Star Trek universe.  It’s primarily episodic (unlike, say, Discovery), and hits all the best Trekkie tropes: court case to defend an officer accused of something that is both unjust and undeniably true, diplomatic mission with impossible-to-please aliens, memory loss, reality warps, time travel, and weird Vulcan mating rituals.  If you love Trek, you’ll definitely love this.

Game Changer (Dropout, 6 seasons so far, Faux Game Show)

There are various forms of the faux quiz show: the Brits practically invented it, with news shows (e.g. Have I Got News For You), wordplay shows (My Word), improv shows (e.g. Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and trivia shows (e.g. QI).  Most of those format have made it to America (e.g. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Says You!, Whose Line Is It Anyway?⁵), so it’s pretty rare to find something new in this space.  Game Changer is not an improv show, definitely not a news show, incoroporates some trivia and wordplay, but isn’t those either ... in point of fact, it’s a bit impossible to say WTF it really is, because it’s a different show every time.  The gimmick of the show is that the “contestants” (generally comedians from the College Humor/Dropout troupe) have no idea what the game is going to be at the outset and have to figure it out as they go along.  Some of these are utterly brilliant, others less so, and occasionally they run out of ideas and repeat a concept from an earlier show, which is a bit disappointing, but overall it’s a great show.  Season 1 is probably the best, but Season 5 has some of my all-time favorite episodes (although it also has 6 episodes doing perverted versions of The Bachelor and Survivor, which I didn’t really care for).  Addictive, and highly recommended.

Stranger Things (Netflix, 4 seasons so far, Urban Fantasy)

I probably don’t have to tell you how good this show is: the blockbuster series made Netflix a shit-ton of money and is generally credited (along with Critical Role) for the resurgence of D&D.  What really gets me is how the show consistently maintains quality across the seasons, adding more and more characters (and more and more great actors) and more complex storylines without ever getting predictable or tedious.  Few shows can match it.  The series finale will be next year, so I’ll likely go back and watch it all from the beginning again, which is a thing I only do for the very best shows.  This is one of them.

Umbrella Academy (Netflix, 3 seasons so far, Superhero Fantasy)

Like Stranger Things, this is an amazing Netflix show that I will undoubtedly rewatch in its entirety before the series finale season 4 later this year.  It’s absolutely a comic book show, though not really a show about superheroes (more a show with superheroes in it); it’s a show where any weird shit at all can happen ... and typically does.  The time travel aspects make it hard to follow sometimes, but it all slots together beautifully, even on repeat viewings, and the characters, outlandish as they are, are human in a way that is both poignant and relatable.  I suppose if you really hate comic book properties, you might not like it, but everyone else should absoutely watch it.

The Sandman (Netflix, 1 season so far, Dark Fantasy)

While Dream of the Endless—a.k.a. the Sandman—is technically a comic book property, it’s also a Neil Gaiman property, and that’s more the vibe here.  If you’re into the comics version, there are Easter eggs here a-plenty, but it will also absolutely grab your interest if you’re just a lover of fantasy stories.  Creating an immortal being who is also relatable to an audience, with all-too-human foibles, is a really difficult task, but the writers here (including Gaiman himself) and actor Tom Sturridge do an amazing job.  The cast is insanely good, including Gwendoline Christie (from Game of Thrones) as Lucifer and Kirby as Death, plus voicework from Patton Oswalt, and a smaller role for Stephen Fry.  Stunning visuals and a complex but satisfying storyline make it a must-watch.  Looking forward to season 2.

Pennyworth (Max, 3 seasons, Gritty British Crime Drama)

Yes, yes: techincally, this is another comic book show.  But it doesn’t really hit the proper absurdities of a comic book show till season 2, and, honestly, you should probably stop after season 1.  That first season, exploring the origin of Bruce Wayne’s butler, follows Alfred on his journey from a turn in the British army to the London underworld, à la Guy Ritchie.  I was amazed at how good they made it, and disappointed at how little they could keep it up.  Season 2 is watchable, but not great; season 3 I’ve never finished because it was just depressing how mundane it became.  I’ll probably get back to it someday though.

Mythic Quest (Apple+, 3 seasons so far, Workplace Comedy/Drama)

Many people adore It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  I am not one of them.  However, the team of Day, Ganz, and McElhenney scored a much bigger hit (to my taste) with this show about videogame developers.  McElhenney is great as the head guy who is both an enormous prick and also a lovable dork, but it’s really Charlotte Nicdao, a perennial on Aussie television but not much known in the US until now, that makes this show work for me.  Add in more amazing actors such as Danny Pudi and F. Murray Abraham, plus the ever-reliable Ashly Burch (voice actor from Borderlands and Horizon Zero Dawn as well as occasional guest on Critical Role), and it’s a home run.  I don’t think seasons 2 and 3 were quite as good as season 1, which has one incredible episode out of nowhere that actually made me cry like a baby, but they’re close.

Inside Man (Netflix, Crime Drama)

David Tenant and Stanley Tucci, British crime drama—I really shouldn’t need to say more than that to hook you.  But this also has a dogged crime journalist, a genius solving cases from behind bars, and Dylan Baker as a prison warden.  Plus an everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong plot that could easily have been a comedy of errors, but here is played straight and becomes an inevitable tragedy.  Especially if you love things like Broadchurch,⁶ don’t miss this.

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Science Fiction)

Chloë Grace Moretz had done 16 movies before I saw her in Kick-Ass, but that was the film that made me remember her name forever.  Especially after following it up with the mind-blowing Let Me In.  This series was a casualty of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strike, which is as big a crime as the ones perpetrated on those unions in the first place.  The story isn’t entirely resolved, but I can’t tell you not to watch this season.  Excellent time travel, excellent scifi gadgets, excellent acting.

The Last of Us (Max, 1 season so far, Post-Apocalyptic Horror)

This is another one I likely don’t need to tell you how good it is.  Bella Ramsey, who has been great in everything I’ve seen her in, from Game of Thrones to The Worst Witch, is stellar here, and it’s tough to go wrong with Pedro Pascal, not to mention ancillary actors like Anna Torv (Fringe), Rutina Wesley (True Blood), and Nick Offerman in a single episode that punches you in the gut like an 800lb gorilla.  It’s scary, it’s gory, it’s creepy, and it’s impactful.  Not many series can do all that in one show.  This one does.

Dimension 20 “Neverafter” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

Yes, it’s a third entry for Dimension 20, and a second recommendation for Brennan Lee Mulligan as GM.  What can I say: they’ve been firing on all cylinders since the pandemic started.  This season, the D20 regulars (Lou Wilson, Emily Axford, Siobhan Thompson, Ally Beardsley, Zac Oyama, and Brian Murphy) each take on the personality of a different fairy tale character (Lou is Pinocchio, Emily is Little Red Riding Hood, etc).  And Brennan throws them into a dark, twisted version of the Brothers Grimm’s world (which is, to be fair, far more close in tone to the original stories than the Disneyfied versions we’ve become accustomed to), and the results are delicious, terrifying, and wondrous to behold.  Probably hit “Pirates” and “Misfits” first, but this should be a close third choice.

Next week: part two.

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1 Or streaming shows.  Can we just call it all “TV” please?  I watch it all on my television, even YouTube.  The fact that it isn’t being broadcast over the airwaves doesn’t make it not televison ... and, if it did, we wouldn’t have been watching TV ever since cable was invented.

2 For context, I consider short-form actual play to be the one-shots, or occasional two-shots, and long-form to be those ongoing campaigns that run anywhere from 50 to 100+ episodes.  So medium form is typically somewhere between 6 and 20 episodes, and is often the perfect place to start if you want to see if actual play is for you.

3 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

4 See part 2 of the pandemic roundup.

5 The trivia format doesn’t seem to have made it to us yet, aside from things like Funny You Should Ask, which is apparently a show on CBS that’s been running since 2017, though I confess I’ve never heard of it before writing this post.

6 See part 1 of the pandemic roundup.

To those who cannot remember the past ...

This week, I had the good fortune to attend an anniversary dinner for my work, where I enjoyed some lovely cuisine with 10 of the 11 other people who have also worked for our company for 10 years or more.  We ate, and drank, and talked, for several hours.

At some point the topic of the recent college student protests against their institutions’ ongoing financial support for the killing of innocent people in Palestine came up.  Now, I think there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about how it really shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to be anti-genocide, and it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that they have the right to protest—it’s literally one of their First Amendment rights, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  But that wasn’t the discussion we had.  The discussion we had was how much of an idiot you have to be to think it’s a good idea to call the police to “break up” a protest on a college campus.  Even a completely clueless administrator (or rich donor, or Speaker of the House) with only a cursory understanding of history should understand that attempts to stop a protest via violence only makes it worse.  (Special dispensation for the Speaker, who doesn’t seem to know any history that isn’t found in the Bible.)  I would more likely believe that the suggestion to call the police on a campus protest came from an undercover instigator who was trying to make damn sure that the protests succeeded than credit the notion that some college president said, with complete lack of irony, “I know: we’ll call in the cops and the National Guard and that will definitely put this silly protest thing behind us.” I am not old enough to remember the violence at Kent State—I was in fact four years old at the time—but I know about it, and even I understand what a moronic idea that is.

The thing that I thought of after that discussion, too late to contribute it there, so that now I must share it here with you, is that it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!” Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

Anyway, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about recently.  Thinking about, as Elizabeth Shackleford put it in the Chicago Tribune, college protests and the right side of history; thinking about the ACLU’s advice to college presidents.  Thinking about how stupid you have to be to want to escalate college protests, and how morally bankrupt you have to be to think you’re going to come out looking good trying to quash them.  Just little stuff like that; nothing too heavy.